This review was first published in RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.04 / Spring 2019, pp. 101-104.
Janina Wellmann, The Form of Becoming : Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760-1830, trans. Kate Sturge (New York : Zone Books, 2017), 424 pp.
Janina Wellmann’s ambitious, cross-disciplinary book,
first published in German in 2010, sets out to achieve two
main aims. First, it attempts to retell and reframe the
emergence of a somewhat neglected discourse around
rhythm, form and becoming as it appears in the history
of science (and embryology specifically) from around the
late eighteenth century. Second, it seeks to bring out the
broader epistemological implications of this discourse
as it emerges from within philosophy, literature, aesthetics
and musicology. Wellman organises this project
by analysing the emergence of the rhythmic episteme
from three perspectives : early German romanticism (in
which post-Kantian literary and philosophical critique
produce a ‘new epistemology of rhythm’) ; the emergent
biological and scientific focus on life and becoming (‘biological
rhythms’) ; and the subsequently transformed observational
and instructional modes of visuality (‘serial
iconography’).
In contextualising her project, Wellmann argues that,
in exploring the rhythmic episteme, her book can help
us see how a new epistemology of rhythm and becoming
emerged long before critical theories of becoming were
employed specifically to destabilise the history of ideas
by later nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers.
So, for example, whilst the young Nietzsche may have
sketched out, around 1870, a ‘theory of quantitative
rhythm’ that sought to investigate how the human body is restructured by the rhythmical movement of music
and poetry operating upon it, one of Wellman’s key arguments
is that rhythm thus conceived was an emergent
category in the history of ideas much earlier. Other—albeit more speculative—claims to contemporary relevance
are that the project may help us to contextualise more
historically the radical temporalisations and spatialisations
which occur in modern philosophy (epitomised by
Derrida’s différance) or the novel bodily and aesthetic
demands of ‘new media’ also. In a book that already
covers so much historical ground, however, it would no
doubt be impossible to explore these contemporary derivations
of becoming across philosophy and visual culture
in any substantial detail. Instead, Wellmann circumvents
this issue by carefully delimiting her project to a specific
period : 1760 to 1830.
The Form of Becoming traces the emergence of the
‘embryological and rhythmic episteme’ across those domains
of knowledge which became focussed on the ‘temporalisation’
or ‘dynamisation’ of observable phenomena
from the second half of the eighteenth to the early nineteenth
century. One of the key achievements of Wellmann’s
project is its tracking of the sheer amount of
iconographical and conceptual attempts at representing
‘rhythm as becoming’ from multiple texts in different
disciplines. Unsurprisingly, the acknowledgements reference
a dazzling range of academic and scientific institutions, across a number of specialisms and territories. Looming over this encyclopaedic landscape, perhaps inevitably,
stands Goethe, whose simultaneously literaryscientific
obsession with becoming and metamorphosis
could be seen to act as a model for the ambitious crossdisciplinary
sweep of Wellmann’s book itself.
Nonetheless, Wellmann tames a potentially sprawling
project by clarifying that the intention is not to
identify any single field of knowledge in which the
concept of rhythm originated, and she is equally dismissive
of any attempt to address ‘migrations, adaptations
or mutual influence’ across disciplines. Rather, the
methodological intent is to trace the changing meanings
of the concept as they were formed in the experimental
systems, research practices and technologies of observation
of the period : the ‘numerous theatres’ attempting to
capture rhythm and becoming running simultaneously.
This is therefore as much a book about a certain moment
in visuality and iconology as it is a history of science
or ideas : ‘Observation and experiment, text and image,
concepts and material objects are all part of this understanding
of how a concept is constituted as a category.’
The theory and practice of rhythm became a familiar
issue in early twentieth-century modernist aesthetic
discourses, particularly in the visual, musical and poetic
realms. However its epistemological roots, Wellmann
argues, actually lie in the history of science, and the development
of embryology more particularly. Embryology,
understood as the transformed sense of the relationship
between time, rhythm and becoming, is foundational
for the critical developments in time and temporality
which took hold across human knowledge around 1800—what Reinhart Koselleck calls the Sattelzeit period of
European modernity. Wellman makes an explicit connection
here by acknowledging Koselleck’s studies of the
transformation and secularisation of western concepts of
temporality in relation to progress, history and culture.
However, Wellmann wants to show here not only that
rhythm as a concept has a history, but that the impact
of temporalisation on the nascent scientific discourse of
biological development as becoming—and most specifically
embryology—created a wholly new episteme and
iconography of form and rhythm.
This striving for the ‘form of becoming’ manifested
itself most immediately in new scientific conceptions of
life. Wellmann cites the Haller-Wolf debate of the 1760s, the roots of modern embryology. Swiss naturalist Albrecht
von Haller observed that organic life emerges out
of pre-formed germ cells, whilst the German physician
Caspar Friedrich Wolff argued, based on observation and—more importantly—schematic and visual interpretation,
that development is a process of the gradual emergence
of forms. Whilst, ultimately, the Wolffian theory
of epigenesis dominated and survives in embryological
discourse to this day, what is as important here is the
employment of new modes of visual interpretation at a
certain moment and the novel understanding of rhythm
and temporalisation that embryology demanded. The becoming
of form emerges as a scientific issue at the level
of observation, and so is as much about iconography and
visual interpretation as it is about concepts.
To this end, Wellman describes in detail some fascinating
observational experiments, revealing their formal
particularities and the ways in which each attempt to
visualise becoming entailed a transformation of the problem
as it moved between concept and image. So, we
range from incubated chick eggs (the urtext of embryology)
via the knotting of a fishing net (captured for the
Encyclopédie) to the various choreographies of dancing,
fencing and military manœuvres. These alone make
the book fascinating, revealing how seriality and transformation were a formal issue outside of and prior to the
emergence of a modernist visual culture.
For Wellman, however, the scientific transformations
of the iconography of temporality and becoming manifest
themselves in other visual discourses after 1800 largely
unconsciously and intermittently. Furthermore, explicit
reflection on the development and nature of these connections
has been neglected. This is in stark contrast
with the plethora of early to mid-modernist cultural discourses
around rhythm, which tend to frame it in terms
of avant-garde aesthetic reorientations (art nouveau, expressionism,
dada, Bauhaus experimentalism) or, sociologically,
as the specific articulation of a cultural moment
(where for example rhythm signifies a historical response
to the demand for ‘vitality, order and unity’ in the Fascist
worldview). Where writers have tried to focus explicitly
on rhythm and its mediating role between biology and
culture, such as is the case in Ludwig Klage’s 1933 On the
Essence of Rhythm, they have tended to retain a dualism
between rhythm as a principle of blind ‘life’, on the one
hand, and meter/cadence as a human act of rationality.
By returning to the pre-modernist sources of rhythm as
episteme, Wellmann intends to place the origins of this
debate a century earlier.
For Wellmann, it is in musicology around 1800 that
these theoretical reflections on rhythm become most
evident, as the discipline expands into generalised concerns
with meter, measure (Takt) and accent (Akzentheorie)
as the keys to an aesthetics of musical form and
beauty. Coupled with the physiological disposition of
the human as ‘rhythmic being’, which both romanticism
and musicology inherit from contemporary science, a
more philosophically systematic account of nature and
becoming is revealed. As such, what was new in 1800
was not the musical concept of rhythm itself, but that
the changed ‘vision of rhythm in both music theory and
biology had—unconsciously—reordered knowledge in
each domain. Rhythm became understood as the underlying
structure of flowing movement, ‘development’ in
both aesthetic and organic meanings of the term. This
is important not least because this places rhythm back
into its truly multi-disciplinary origins : the category of
rhythm for Wellmann indicates a lost unity of cultural
and natural thought, which existed before nineteenthcentury
academic and scientific specialisation split them
into separate and distinct spheres.
It will be no surprise to anyone familiar with the
all-encompassing cross-disciplinarity of German romanticism
that thinkers such as Hölderlin, Schelling, Novalis
and the Schlegel brothers play such a crucial role in this
story. Romantic conceptions of poetic form and becoming,
and their crucial role in re-unifying imagination and
understanding, place issues of language, and rhythm and
meter, at the centre of poetic theory. It was Klopstock,
with his long-term involvement in developing a theory
of ‘versification’ and ‘co-expression’ of motion and syllables,
who paved the way. Poetry might be raised to
a form of knowledge in itself, or may even become, in
Hölderlin’s phrase, a ‘better philosophy’, and it is the
latter who will attempt to marry language as acoustic
event with the ‘calculable laws’ of poetic theory. Issues
of literary rhythm, most notably the ‘counter-rhythmic
rupture’ or the caesura, are its most famous moments
for Wellmann. Hölderlin’s conception of tonal/rhythmic
alternation and temporal interruption places him at the
heart of contemporary physiological debates on the alternation
of matter, wherein the continuing oscillation
of organic matter between solid and liquid states is seen
as the definitive quality of organic existence itself. The
physiology of the body is constituted by transitional matter,
ordered according to particular rules. It is the search
for these rules of development and transformation which
unite romanticism and science at this time, the search for
a teleological principle or drive behind ‘becoming’ itself,
which will motivate later contributions to romanticism
such as those of Novalis. Wellmann focuses upon August
Wilhelm Schlegel’s historical exposition of Urlanguage
and shows how its emergence from the corporeality of
the human being (in his 1795 Letters on poetry, poetic
meter and language) speculatively extend romantic principles
into cultural history itself. In his later Jena lectures
on the history of poetic form, art history thus becomes
natural and biological history, centred around the understanding
of ‘humanness’ as rhythmical organisation and
expression.
With Schelling, the claim became even stronger :
rhythm, reconceived systematically via language, philosophy
of nature and theories of artistic form, opens up a
path to the absolute itself. Music is the art form of the
‘informing [Einbildung] of unity into multiplicity’ as it
brings together individual tones and the plurality of their
sequences and permutations. Rhythm—which Schelling did not conceive of as a property specific to musical representation
alone—is primal to nature and the universe itself,
‘pure movement, separated from the object’ making
visible the original identity of the absolute. Wellmann
briefly describes how Schelling’s Naturphilosophie fulfils
this philosophical task. However, she ultimately stops
short of expounding the fuller epistemological and critical
implications of this development in the history of
ideas. There is, for example, only a passing reference to
how Hegel’s subsequent Phenomenology of Spirit ‘overshadowed’
Schelling’s work at this point.
Perhaps inevitably for such a wide-ranging project,
the philosophical considerations are often handled
briefly, and, read from a contemporary perspective, may
beg more questions than they can possibly answer. The reflections on the inheritance of German romanticism, for example, stop short of any detailed discussion of dialectical
philosophy, or any prolonged consideration of
how this new episteme may actually have been picked
up by other radical or scientifically-minded philosophies
of temporality from the mid twentieth century onwards.
Overall, one should treat this fascinating project as a
philosophically-cognisant and visually-literate history
of ideas rather than a work of philosophy per se. It will
be up to others to capitalise on its historical foundations,
particularly the multidisciplinary connections it makes
and the close visual analysis it offers of early iconographical
experiments in capturing becoming.